Early life and training

Jekyll was educated by her parents and by German and French governesses at home at Bramley House in Surrey, where the family lived from 1848 until 1868. Here she met scientists, engineers, musicians, artists, members of parliament, and archaeologists, including Michael Faraday, Felix Mendelssohn, Sir Charles Newton, Sir Henry Layard, and Sir Gilbert Lewis, many of whom she sketched. Here, too, she had her first garden, with her sister Caroline Jekyll (1837–1928), and learned practical skills in her father's workshop. In 1861 she enrolled with her friend and fellow student Susan Muir-Mackenzie at the National School of Art in South Kensington. She was taught anatomy by John Marshall, botanical drawing and ornament by Christopher Dresser, and colour harmony by Richard Redgrave. From 1865 her paintings, upon which John Ruskin commented favourably, were exhibited at the Royal Academy and the Society of Female Artists.

In 1868 the family moved to Wargrave Hill, overlooking the River Thames in Berkshire. Although the landscape was not to her liking because it was based on chalk and not the sand of the Surrey Weald, with its woods and heathlands, Gertrude Jekyll's painting, craft, interior decoration, and gardening activities, begun at Bramley House, increased and their quality was instantly recognized. George Leslie RA, remarked on both the range and quality of her accomplishments:

Clever and witty in conversation, active and energetic in mind and body, and possessed of artistic talents of no common order … there is hardly any useful handicraft the mysteries of which she has not mastered—carving, modelling, house painting, carpentry, smith's works, repoussé work. Gilding, wood inlaying, embroidery, gardening, and all manner of herb and flower knowledge and culture, everything being carried on with perfect method and completeness.

Leslie, 35

Artist, craftwork, and interior decoration

In 1869 Jekyll visited William Morris and, although not part of the arts and crafts movement, was imbued by its spirit of the unity of the arts. For her this unity was not just an artistic concept but was fundamental to her special skills in home-making, which she applied throughout her life. In his memoir Sir Herbert Baker wrote:

her outstanding possession was the power to see, as a poet, the art and creation of home-making as a whole in relation to Life; the best simple English country life of her day, frugal, yet rich in beauty and comfort; in the building and its furnishing and their homely craftsmanship, in the garden uniting the house with surrounding nature; all in harmony and breathing the spirit of its creator.

Baker, 15–16

Between 1867 and 1893 she visited the artist G. F. Watts, sat to him 'for arms' (F. Jekyll, 87), and asserted after one visit that she felt she had been 'in paradise' (Blunt, 207).

Miss Jekyll's craft and garden work was sought by a growing band of clients, whether it was a window box for a mechanic in Rochdale in 1870, or in the same year the architectural drawings, details, and plantings for Phillimore's Spring at Crazies Hill, north of Wargrave in Berkshire, a tablecloth, designed and embroidered for Lord Leighton, or quilts for him and for Edward Burne-Jones. In 1871 she painted the fish casts for Frank Buckland's Economic Fish Museum. She received commissions for interior design work and execution from the duke of Westminster in 1875 and also from Lord Ducie. At Eaton Hall, newly enlarged and modernized by Alfred Waterhouse, not only did she design and partly work with members of the Royal School of Embroidery the panels for the turret doors and the tapestry in the drawing-room, but she also advised on the furnishing. In addition she designed and made the gates for the entrance to Eaton Hall and earned a reputation as an art blacksmith. Her most comprehensive interior design work was for Jacques Blumenthal, a composer of popular songs and pianist to Queen Victoria, and his wife, Leonie, at 43 Hyde Park Gate, London. Here from 1871 she designed and executed the wall decorations of orange trees and peacocks and the ceilings of orange leaves. She also designed and made the quilted curtains and carried out the inlay work and the arrangement of the furnishings. At Le Chalet, the Blumenthals' home in Switzerland, an inner circle of friends spent evenings singing some of Gertrude Jekyll's translations of songs in German to the accompaniment of the pianist Lionel Benson, whose caricatures of her as a ballerina and singer of French chansons convey an unexpected aspect of her character. Through the Blumenthals, Jekyll met Barbara Bodichon, née Leigh-Smith, the artist and co-founder of Girton College, Cambridge and Bedford College, London, and the impressionist Hercules Brabazon, about whom she averred in 1906 that 'nobody has helped me more than Mr. Brabazon to understand and enjoy the beauty of colour and of many aspects concerning the fine arts' (Massingham, 107). During the winter of 1873–4, Miss Jekyll, Brabazon, and Frederic Walker stayed with Barbara Bodichon and her husband in Algiers. Watercolours of the landscapes, plants, buildings, and people in and around Algiers fill the pages of Gertrude Jekyll's albums at the Surrey History Centre in Woking, Surrey.

Plant collecting and breeding

Gertrude Jekyll was profoundly affected by the plants, vegetation, landscapes, and architecture of the Mediterranean, which she had first seen in 1863 and 1864 when she accompanied Charles and Mary Newton to Turkey, Rhodes, and Greece. She collected plants from countries around the Mediterranean—Greece and Turkey in 1863–4, Italy in 1872 and 1876, and Capri in 1883—using a specially designed pick, and sent them back to England, where she tested them for their hardiness and utility as garden plants. From Capri she collected Lithospermum rosmarinifolium, Crocus imperati, Smilax aspera, a procumbent form of Rosmarinus officinalis, Rosa sempervirens, and Campanula fragilis; from Switzerland, Primula villosa, and from the Pyrenees, Fritillaria pyrenaica. Plants of Mediterranean origin became a characteristic feature of her garden designs and were grown close to the house and against garden walls that afforded some protection during the English winter. She grew many irids from the Mediterranean, including the blue and white Iris unguicularis (I. stylosa) (collected and introduced by Edwyn Arkwright), as well as aromatic shrubs such as rosemary and lavender, and, if the English climate had permitted, would have grown out of doors agaves, aloes, opuntias, and bougainvilleas, which she had seen and painted in Algeria, for their bold and striking foliage and distinctive flowers. Her sister Caroline gardened on the Mediterranean coast and created a famous garden on the Guidecca in Venice from 1884 using a rich palette of Mediterranean plants. Two of her brothers were also able gardeners: Walter (1849–1929) showed what could be done following his sister's principles of garden design using tropical and subtropical plants in his garden in the Blue Mountains in Jamaica, and Herbert (1846–1932) maintained and enriched the garden she had laid out and planted at Munstead House, Surrey, after their mother's death in 1895.

Since 1863 Gertrude Jekyll had been collecting plants from the wild in Britain and throughout Europe, and from cottage gardens, and improving them. Many of the forms she bred were given to friends, some of whom, such as George Paul of Messrs Paul & Son, the Old Nurseries, Cheshunt, introduced them commercially and exhibited them in the Royal Horticultural Society's rooms. Miss Jekyll selected and bred more than thirty herbaceous annuals, biennials, and perennials and dwarf shrubs. Six were highly commended or received the award of merit from 1896 and continued to receive awards well after her death. For example, Primula ‘Munstead bunch’ received a bronze Banksian medal from the Royal Horticultural Society in 1900, and Lavandula angustifolia ‘Munstead’ in 1963. Although she took care to guard against loss by sending plants to botanic gardens, such as Kew, most have not survived. Only eight of the plants she bred are still available: Aquilegia vulgaris ‘Munstead white’, Lavandula angustifolia ‘Munstead’, Nigella damascena ‘Miss Jekyll’, Primula ‘Munstead bunch’, Pulmonaria angustifolia ‘Munstead blue’, Sedum telephium ‘Munstead red’, Vinca minor ‘Gertrude Jekyll’, and Viola hispida ‘Jackanapes’. (The origins of the cultivar names are given in Tooley and Arnander, 130ff.) More than ten years before receiving her first awards for plant breeding Gertrude Jekyll was arranging displays of spring flowers at the Royal Horticultural Society and entering them successfully in the floral committee section to be judged; in 1885 she received a bronze medal for her display of daffodils and primroses. It came as no surprise therefore that she was one of only two women (the other was Ellen Willmott) to be awarded in 1897 the Victoria medal of honour of the Royal Horticultural Society by the president, Sir Trevor Lawrence. It was perhaps an even greater honour and pleasure for her to be referred to as the Queen of Spades by Dean Reynolds Hole, who responded on her behalf at the ceremony.

Garden designer

In 1875 Miss Jekyll met William Robinson at the offices of The Garden and from 1881 began contributing articles to his journal. Her obituarist attributed to Miss Jekyll and William Robinson 'not only the complete transformation of English horticultural method and design, but also that wide diffusion of knowledge and taste which has made us almost a nation of gardeners' (The Times, 10 Dec 1932, 12). In 1876 Miss Jekyll's father died, and her mother commissioned John James Stevenson, one of the leading architects of the Queen Anne style and an adherent of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings founded by William Morris, Philip Webb, and others, to design a home for herself and her daughter on Munstead Heath, Surrey. Gertrude Jekyll laid out the garden. It was made up from many elements, including a parterre, a pergola, a bank of Scotch briars, an alpine garden, a grove of azaleas, an auricula garden, an orchard, a hardy flower border, a reserve garden, and a kitchen garden. There were lawns running into the heath, grass walks, and rhododendron plantings. It was the precursor of the garden of her own home, Munstead Wood, built in 1895 across the lane from Munstead House. This garden broke the mould of the Victorian flower garden, and a contemporary visitor noted that it was laid out in 'quite an unconventional way' (Goldring, 191). The garden designer, author, and student of Kew, William Goldring, visited Munstead House in 1882 and described the hardy flower border:

the brilliancy of the border … was beyond anything we had hitherto seen in the way of hardy flowers—as different from the ordinary mixed border as night from day … The great point in this border is the grouping of the colours in broad masses, all being blended as to produce one harmonious whole.

ibid.,

Distinguished gardeners and botanists, including Dean Reynolds Hole, William Robinson, G. F. Wilson, Sir Michael Foster, F. W. Burbidge, Sir Joseph Hooker, James and Harry Mangles, Theresa Earle, Ellen Willmott, Sir Frederick Moore, the Revd C. Wolley Dod, Peter Barr, Max Leichtlin, Sir Thomas Hanbury, Dr Alexander Wallace, Mrs E. V. Boyle, Beatrix Farrand, and Edith Wharton, repaired to both Munstead House and Munstead Wood to see the gardens. Henri Correvon, the director of Le Jardin Alpin d'Acclimatation in Geneva, visited Munstead in 1894 and noted that the garden had 'deservedly attained a universal reputation for excellence' (Correvon, 167).

Drawing on close observation of nature, plants and gardens, hard labour, and much practice, Miss Jekyll applied to the designs and plantings of gardens 'the sensitive artistry and skill of hand hitherto devoted to her painting and handcrafts' (Hussey, 23). For Gertrude Jekyll, 'the first purpose of a garden is to be a place of quiet beauty such as will give delight to the eye and repose and refreshment to the mind' (Jekyll, Garden design on old-fashioned lines, 383–4). Much of her inspiration for laying out ground came from nature. However, in her first book, Wood and Garden: Notes and Thoughts, Practical and Critical, of a Working Amateur, published in 1899, she wrote that:

no artificial planting can equal that of Nature, but one may learn from it the great lesson of the importance of moderation and reserve, of simplicity of intention, of directness of purpose, and the inestimable value of the quality called ‘breadth’ in painting. For planting ground is painting a landscape with living things, and as I hold that good gardening ranks within the bounds of the fine arts, so I hold that to plant well needs an artist of no mean capacity. And his difficulties are not slight ones, for his living pictures must be right from all points, and in all lights.

Jekyll, Wood and Garden, 156–7

Gertrude Jekyll's principles of gardening were enunciated earlier in 1896 in the Edinburgh Review, and to these she kept faith for the next thirty-five years, both in her garden at Munstead Wood and in more than 400 commissions in Great Britain (166 in Surrey alone) and in Ireland, France, Germany, Yugoslavia, and the United States of America. She subscribed neither to the formal school of landscape gardening, as exemplified in the work of Sir Reginald Blomfield and William Andrews Nesfield, nor to the free school of her friend William Robinson. She selected the best from both schools, extolling their most worthy properties. The principles of garden design that she followed comprised six articles: by forming and respecting quiet spaces of lawn, unbroken by flower beds or any encumbrance; by the simple grouping of noble types of hardy vegetation, whether their beauty be that of flower, foliage, or general aspect; by putting the right thing in the right place—a matter which involves both technical knowledge and artistic ability; by employing restraint and proportion in the manner of numbers and/or quantity—to use enough and not too much of any one thing at a time; by grouping plants in sequences of good colouring and with due regard to their form and stature and season of blooming, or of autumnal beauty of foliage; and by seeing how to join house to garden and garden to woodland. The book that she wrote in 1908, Colour in the Flower Garden, exemplifies and is the practical outcome of these principles.

At about the same time Jekyll established, with the help of her Swiss gardener Albert Zumbach, a plant nursery at Munstead Wood. This was not only for economic reasons, to supply both plants and planting plans to her clients, but also to ensure their availability so that the right pictorial effect was realized and plant substitution, sometimes practised by her clients' gardeners, avoided. As late as 1932 she was promoting her nursery to the actress Amy Barnes-Brand in the following terms: 'I have a splendid list of good hardy plants, and bigger plants and at lower prices than the nurseries' (Tooley and Arnander, 120). The plant nursery was run by her for thirty-five years, until 1932. Each year thousands of plants were dispatched: for Sir George Sitwell's garden at Renishaw 1250 plants were sent in February and March 1910; for Roger Fry's garden at Durbins in Guildford a single consignment of plants dispatched in May 1911 numbered 600; and at the end of the year more than 3000 plants were sent to a client in Berkhamsted. After her death the nursery was run by her nephew Francis Jekyll (1882–1965) for a further nine years.

Gertrude Jekyll's clients included friends and relatives, government departments (including the War Graves Commission), publishers (Edward Hudson), newspaper owners (Lord Northcliffe), mill owners (Sir Amos Nelson and J. T. Hemingway), bankers (Otto Falk), local authorities (for example, the borough of Godalming), university colleges (including Newnham College and Girton College, Cambridge), churches (such as St Edmund's and the Wesleyan church, Godalming), schools (Charterhouse), hospitals (King Edward VII Sanatorium, Midhurst, Sussex), and charities (the National Trust), as well as some of the most distinguished public servants in the country such as Lord Curzon, Lord Lytton, Lord Revelstoke, and Reginald McKenna. She designed flower borders in suburban gardens and reached a large popular audience through her articles in The Garden, Gardening Illustrated, the Daily Mail, and the Daily Express.

Most (247) of Miss Jekyll's garden designs and planting plans were commissions received directly from clients, but others (153) came from collaborations with distinguished architects, such as her friend Sir Edwin Lutyens, Sir Robert Lorimer, Oliver Hill, Sidney Barnsley, Sir Herbert Baker, Morley Horder, L. Rome Guthrie, and M. H. Baillie Scott, and provincial architects such as Walter Brierley. While most of the architects with whom she collaborated provided her with outline plans of the garden ground, with Lutyens the plans were dynamic and interactive. Lutyens regularly visited her at Munstead Wood, for which he was the architect, referring to it as 'Plazzoh' or 'Bumpstead' and to her as 'Bumps'. He provided the detailed drawings for the garden and Jekyll the planting plans that softened, enriched, and emphasized his hard ground effects. Hestercombe, Somerset (1904), is the best example of this brilliant partnership, with Jekyll's planting enhancing and complementing the lines of perspective, the changes of level, the water features, the surprise views, and the sequestered bowers of the new garden that wraps around the house, all created with the craftsmanship and natural materials that both had seen together in the vernacular architecture of Surrey. The Jekyll–Lutyens garden at Hestercombe exploits the site with glimpses of the eighteenth-century designed landscape, further enhanced by plantings of the now-drained serpentine lake margins by Miss Jekyll and long views of the Blackdown Hills to the south. The working relationship between Jekyll and Lutyens was summed up by Miss Jekyll herself in a comment to Betty Balfour: 'Bumps told Betty that the difference between working with Nedi and Lorimer was as between quicksilver and suet' (RIBA, Lutyens Papers, LuE/4/10/7 (i–) Ap 12, 1901).

The gardens Miss Jekyll designed have to a great extent been lost, although some—such as her own garden at Munstead (1882); Hestercombe (1904); Lindisfarne Castle, Holy Island, Northumberland (1911); the Old Manor House, Upton Grey, near Winchfield in Hampshire (1908); and the Old Glebe House, Woodbury, Connecticut, USA (1926)—have been restored. The rich record she kept in plans, letters, writings, and photographs she took to illustrate articles and books (and six volumes of annotated photographs in the College of Environmental Design, University of California) permit, however, a glimpse of her genius as 'the greatest artist in horticulture and garden planting' (Hussey, 23).

Author

Gertrude Jekyll wrote fourteen books, three of which were published by Longmans and the rest by Country Life, but her prodigious output of articles (more than 1138) in the gardening journals from 1881 to 1932, on a wide range of topics and illustrated with her photographs from Munstead House and Munstead Wood, bears witness to her desire to communicate ideas and information based on observation and practice to a large and interested public. A series of articles on flowers and plants in the house formed the basis of Flower Decoration in the House (1907), and the series on garden and woodland in the Guardian Newspaper served as the basis for the first book she wrote, Wood and Garden (1899).

These articles and books contain apposite and economical notes on the cultural requirements and pictorial effects of individual plants or plant associations. Plants tested successfully for their hardiness, such as Romneya coulteri and Carpenteria california, are often described. Gertrude Jekyll was probably the first to flower successfully out of doors the giant lily, Cardiocrinum giganteum (Lilium giganteum). She was responsible for introducing the giant hogweed, Heracleum mantegazzianum, in woodland plantings around Britain, and between 1911 and 1932 she wrote several articles about this proscribed plant, which she described thus: 'this grand plant has an appearance of greater refinement and beauty … and the mien of a specially proud and sumptuous plant' (Jekyll, Bog gardens, 670), as well as including it in planting plans such as those for Blagdon in Northumberland. There were articles on gardens that she and others had designed, such as Millmead, Surrey; Sandbourne, Worcestershire; Frant Court, Kent; and Warley, Essex, and articles on women as gardeners. Descriptions of tools she had designed included picks, trowels, labels, and the rolling steps. There were unexpected articles on railway gardening, gardening on corrugated iron, the rot pit, and the topiary cat cut in yew at Munstead Wood. She collected tools and old articles of cottage furniture and equipment throughout west Surrey, which were subsequently donated to Guildford Museum, and she wrote about them and the life and ways of country folk in Old West Surrey (1904). During her lifetime, the books she wrote were often reprinted and continued to be sought. In the 1970s and 1980s they were reissued, and they continue to be a source of inspiration.

In 1920 Sir Edwin Lutyens persuaded Gertrude Jekyll to sit for her portrait to William Nicholson. She agreed provided it was not during the hours of daylight. So she was painted by lamplight while she rested, and during the daylight hours William Nicholson painted her Balmoral boots. Of her portrait, now in the National Portrait Gallery, she referred to herself as a 'passive auxiliary' and wished 'it could have represented a more beautiful object' (F. Jekyll, 188).

The painting of her (men's) Balmoral boots is in the Tate collection; the boots had been bought by Gertrude Jekyll in Paris in 1883, at the time she had acquired a pair for William Robinson, and remained in continual use for almost fifty years, repaired and patched. In 1900 she wrote:

no carpenter likes a new plane; no house painter likes a new brush. It is the same with clothes; the familiar ease can only come of use and better acquaintance. I suppose no horse likes a new collar; I am quite sure I do not like new boots.

Jekyll, Home and Garden, 119

Gertrude Jekyll's ideas on gardening and planting have been remarkably persistent, spanning many years in three centuries. Her ideas do not rely on fashion, but are based on practice and experience communicated in English that was 'direct, simple and discriminating' (Hussey, 23). In July 1904 she admitted to Edwin Lutyens that 'she gloried at the idea of the children being in the studio and would give up all her garden for paddling!!' (RIBA, LuE, 28 July 1904). Fortunately she did not, and the fruits of a long, talented, creative, and industrious life as an artist, gardener, and craftsman are manifest in her paintings, garden designs, photographs, books, and journal articles.

Gertrude Jekyll received few awards. Following the Victoria medal of honour in 1897, the Royal Horticultural Society awarded her the Veitch gold medal in 1929, and in the same year she received from the Massachusetts Horticultural Society the George Robert White medal of honor. She died at Munstead Wood on 8 December 1932 and was buried in the churchyard of St John the Baptist, Busbridge, Surrey, on 12 December. She was unmarried. As she stood at the open door of Munstead Wood in 1932 Logan Pearsall Smith recalled her as 'some ancient, incredibly aristocratic rhinoceros gazing gravely out from amid a tangle of river reeds' (Smith, 64). In his life of Lutyens, Christopher Hussey described her as 'earthy and practical and determined … short, stout, myopic, downright … a frightening, but kind, wise old lady' (p. 23).